Tuesday, 31 January 2012

January 30, 2012: Facebook, among others, has been sued for
patent infringement by MacroSolve, Inc.
in the Texas Eastern District Court. The patent-in-suit is US7822816
(the ‘816 patent) titled “System and method for data management”. The ‘816 patent essentially discloses steps
for distributing electronic forms via the Internet or to mobile devices and
receiving responses for evaluating and analysis. The other defendants in the
patent suit are Yelp, Wal-Mart Stores, Hyatt Corporation and newegg. According to Foss patents, MacroSolve
had sued
close to 20 companies in June last year, primarily targeting small mobile app
developers. Further, MacroSolve brought patent infringement lawsuits
against 10 more companies on January 03, 2012.

Claim 1 of the ‘816 patent recites:

A method for managing
data including the steps of: (a) creating a questionnaire comprising a series
of questions; (b) tokenizing said questionnaire; thereby producing a plurality
of tokens representing said questionnaire; (c) establishing a first wireless
modem or wireless LAN network connection with a remote computing device; (d)
transmitting said plurality of tokens to a remote computing device via said
first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection; (e) terminating said
first wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection with said remote
computing device; (f) after said first wireless modem or wireless LAN network
connection is terminated, executing at least a portion of said plurality of
tokens representing said questionnaire at said remote computing device to
collect a response from a user; (g) establishing a second wireless modem or
wireless LAN network connection between said remote computing device and a
server; (h) after said second wireless modem or wireless LAN network connection
is established, transmitting at least a portion of said response from the user
to said server via said second wireless modem or wireless LAN network
connection; and (i) storing said transmitted response at said server.

The ‘816 patent was issued by the United States Patent and
Trademark Office on October 26, 2010. MacroSolve has also filed another patent
application (US20110040831A1)
which is a continuation of the ‘816 patent.

Pulse manufactures electronic components for areas such as magnetics,
antennas, automotive, broadband access and connectors. It is based out of San
Diego, California and has offices in Germany and China. The following patents
owned by Pulse Electronics that are related to connectors are involved in the
suit.

Monday, 23 January 2012

An interesting judgment was delivered by the high court of Delhi in “Dr. Aloys Wobben vs Yogesh
Mehra & Ors” on January 20, 2012. The issue revolved on whether a party
should be permitted to continue the prosecution of proceedings for revocation
of patents (instituted by the party) in a Patent Appellate Board when the party
has elected to prosecute their counter claims for revocation of the same
patents in an infringement suit in a court.

Section 64
of the India Patents Act 1970 is directed towards revocation of patents.
Section 64 essentially states that revocation can be brought in two forums –
The Intellectual Property Appellate Board, where a petition for revocation can
be filed by any person interested or by the central government and in the High
court as counter claim in an infringement suit.

In Dr.
Aloys Wobben vs Yogesh Mehra & Ors, the respondents (defendants) had
filed petitions for revocation of patents and were also contesting counter
claims in high court for an infringement suit brought against them. The
question to be answered was whether proceedings in two separate forums be
allowed.

Some interesting observations in the judgment:

Parallel
proceedings in two separate forums (IPAB, High Court) for revocation of
the very same patents could not proceed if, they were found to be
inconsistent with each other.

If the
nature of the challenge in the two forums was materially different, it was
quite possible to contend that proceedings could continue concurrently
both before the IPAB and the High Court.

Concurrent
or even cumulative proceeding can continue till satisfaction is obtained
via either proceeding. Satisfaction sets up a bar as, it results in an
advantage to one party and disadvantage to another.

It was concluded that two concurrent proceedings can proceed
unimpeded till a stage of satisfaction is reached.

If a third party files an opposition to a European patent
with the EPO and also, in parallel, initiates a revocation action (also called
"nullity action" or "validity proceedings") against the
same patent before a national court, the national court (at least in England)
may exercise its discretion to either

stay
the national proceedings, in order to wait the outcome of the EPO
opposition proceedings, or

allow
the revocation proceedings to go ahead, without waiting the outcome of the
EPO proceedings.

The complaint is available here. The '967 patent discloses systems and methods that provide secure and firewall restricted Web-based access to control devices and components residing on a non-IP network within an industrial environment. The '967 patent has 14 independent claims and 53 dependent claims.

The CGPDTM issued a notice on 19th January 2012 that most of the missing files have been reconsititued and records have been updated. Last year, the office had notified to the public that 44,404 files were missing and requested inputs from registered proprietors and trademark agents to help the office to reconstitue the missing files.

The number of missing files now stands at 47. Though, everyone would agree that 47 definitely is a better number than 44,404 in the present case, the question that needs attention is "What steps has the office taken to ensure that such incidents don't happen again?" Digitization is definitely the answer and the way ahead, but have enough steps been taken to protect the data from unauthorized access and appropriate backup sites been created in case of a breakdown or loss of data at a hosting sites due to unseen circumstances?

There are many patent databases in the market that allow one to perform a prior art search to determine the novelty of their invention. However, not all patent databases are available for free. Most of the powerful patent database such as Delphion, Micropatent, Patbase are paid services and cannot be used for running searches unless you have an account. So what does one do if they cannot afford to subscribe to such paid patent databases.

There are several freely available patent databases and search services that one can use to still perform an effective prior art search. The features available in the paid databases are obviously better and their coverage is more exhaustive but the freely available patent databases are fast catching up in terms of the features and services they provide to a searcher/inventor.

Below is a list of freely available patent databases that can be used for performing prior art searches. A majority of these patent database cover jurisdictions such as US, EP, JP and WO (WIPO). Go ahead and explore them!